The present application relates generally to an improved data processing apparatus and method and more specifically to mechanisms for optimizing object status consistency within clustered file systems.
A clustered file system is a file system which is shared by being simultaneously mounted on multiple servers. There are several approaches to clustering, most of which do not employ a clustered file system (only direct attached storage for each node). Clustered file systems provide features like location-independent addressing and redundancy which improve reliability or reduce the complexity of the other parts of the cluster. Parallel file systems, such as the General Parallel File System (GPFS™) developed by IBM®, are a type of clustered file system that spreads files across multiple storage nodes, usually for redundancy or performance.
The GPFS™ is a high-performance clustered file system that can be deployed in shared-disk or shared-nothing distributed parallel modes. GPFS™ provides high performance by allowing files to be accessed over multiple computers at once. Most existing file systems are designed for a single server environment, and adding more file servers does not improve performance. GPFS™ provides higher input/output performance by “striping” blocks of data from individual files over multiple disks, GPFS™ reading and writing these blocks of data in parallel. Other features provided by GPFS™ include high availability, support for heterogeneous clusters, disaster recovery, security, Data Management Application Programming Interface (DMAPI), Hardware Security Module (HSM), and Information Lifecycle Management (ILM).